Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Prop. 19: not dead yet

The latest polling has Prop. 19 losing. That’s consistent with my intuition; getting a proposition passed in California generally requires more money and more energy than the Prop. 19 operation has been able to generate, and the combination of bad drafting and the RAND $40-an-ounce estimate ought to be enough to kill the deal, even given the truly primitive this-is-your-brain-on-drugs effort being mounted by the opponents.

But I’m not convinced. One of the yes-on-19 groups did a split-sample poll, with some respondents answering a live interviewer and others punching keypad buttons. The results (assuming the poll is being reported accurately) suggests that live polling may be noticeably under-estimating support for the proposition: the fact that the demographics of the two subsamples match closely makes me a tentative believer. With virtually every politician and newspaper in the state denouncing Prop. 19, it wouldn’t be surprising if some people were reluctant to express their disagreement (and risk being thought of as potheads).

Moreover, support for Prop. 19 declines sharply with age; the under-30s are overwhelmingly for it. They’re also much more likely than their elders to have cell phones only and therefore be missed by most polling, which calls only land-lines.

So this could still go either way. The InTrade market, which showed the proposition favored as recently as a week ago, now gives it one chance in three of passing. At those odds, I’m not taking either end of the bet. It may come down to whether the “amotivational syndrome” some drug-prevention folks have tried to attribute to cannabis applies to voting.